The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

This won 7 Academy Awards (8 if you include the honorary Oscar given to Harold Russell), but I can't help but feel that while The Best Years of Our Lives is an important film from a historical perspective, it really doesn't hold up artistically after 60 years, and bad pacing is the primary culprit.


** mild spoilers **


It starts well, with Dana Andrews returning home from the war and unable to get a flight home.  His struggles to get on a domestic flight are contrasted with a comfortable-looking "fat cat" civvie who happily pays a surcharge because he has too much luggage.  Finally, Dana picks up his single bag and heads off to the other side of the airfield, where other vets are waiting to catch flights home as they become available, and makes friends with Frederic March and Harold Russell (a double amputee with hooks for hands), who all happen to come from the same town.  They fly over the American heartland together and think about this great country they've fought for, and are concerned about what it will be like to go home.  They take a cab together, and each gets dropped off in turn.


Harold is worried about how his family and his girl will react to his prostheses; Frederic is worried about how he'll reacclimate to life as a wealthy banker; Dana was mostly concerned with being dropped off last, because he's slightly embarrassed that his family is so poor.  When he gets home, he find out that his wife has been living "in town" and has a job working late at a nightclub.  So Dana goes out to look for her.  Meanwhile, Frederic has taken his wife (Myrna Loy of The Thin Man fame) and daughter (who is out of HS and has been volunteering at the hospital) "out on the town", and Harold (after a painfully set up scene in which he drops a glass because of his hooks) goes for a walk to his Uncle Butch's bar (wonderfully played by Hoagy Carmichael), and naturally, soon enough Dana and Frederic (and his wife and daughter) end up there, too.  Dana and Frederic's daughter hit it off, though nothing can come of it because he's married, but by the end of the drunken evening he still can't find his wife, and so Frederic's wife and daughter drag him to their home to spend the night.  Dana has nightmares and Frederic's daughter sits by him until he can go back to sleep.  In the morning, there's palpable tension between the two, but Dana still has to go find his wife.


So far, so great!  But then there's an hour and a half of film devoted to a steady stream of scenes shot at the same steady pace to illustrate how they're having trouble "going home".  Harold refuses to believe his girl still loves him, takes up rifle practice in the garage, and scares his little sister.  Frederic has a drinking problem, his son is confused by his HS teacher about whether it was OK to drop the bomb on Japan, his daughter is in love with a married man, and his bank is too conservative with giving loans to veterans.  Dana can't find a good job and his wife loved the man in uniform, not the soda jerk.  This should be compelling stuff, but not when delivered in a cinematic monotone.


On the plus side, it ends well, with Dana Andrews reliving a war memory and then finally getting a decent job.  (there's a final scene with Harold's marriage, but it's just tidying up)